New Blog Template.

Just skip to the bottom if you want to know how to use this thing!

Let’s just say I got really ambitious with my latest template. I’ve been in Alabama on vacation for the Christmas holidays and I realized that I hadn’t changed my blog’s template in close to a year. I’ve been thinking about switching to a “magazine-styled” theme for a while and The Morning After was the prettiest one out there so I gave it a test spin a couple of days ago to see what kind of punch it packed. And it didn’t under deliver at all. In fact, I’m still finding nice little bits of helpful code that automate different things.

I know a lot of people are moving to more simplistic, textual based layouts, but I really wanted something that reflected my visual and creative nature. So this design is heavy on graphics, but hopefully they work in such a way that they lead you visually to where you want to go.

The challenge for me is to make this layout work for everybody, the tech-savvy blog reader and then the casual reader who is not used to sorting through a bunch of chaos to find something.

Here’s the way it works. The latest post will always be on the left hand side of the page. Under the biggest graphic. It will also be “excerpted” now so that you can pass over it if doesn’t interest you. If it does, click “continue reading”. Underneath that will be a featured post, which will more than likely be the most popular post from the week before. Hopefully, this will be a way of keeping the conversation going. One of the problems with my style of blogging is that I do it so often and on random stuff. So the good conversation via comments get lost in the shuffle of being 5 or 6 posts down. Hopefully, this will give some of those posts more room to breathe and will encourage the conversation instead of glazing over it.

Underneath that, I’m running an “asides” box and a “twitter” box. I’m not sure that I’ll stay with two of them. But ultimately this will be where I start posting my “random links” throughout the day instead of cluttering up the site with a couple of different random posts. The positive of the “asides” is that it’s simply a category function and will still show up in your RSS as a regular post. The positive of Twitter is just that it’s awesome. So I’m not sure what I’ll end up with on this.

In the middle of the page will be my last 5 posts. Instead of having 5 full length posts on the front page, there will now only be 1 in the latest post section. The other 5 posts will be located here and will be done so visually. And I may even ad excerpts here as well at some point.

Other than that, the sidebars will feature some of the same content as before once I figure out how to do it. Some of the code is acting up for me over there now and I haven’t had much time to troubleshoot.

Ultimately, in 2008, I hope to move towards more CONTENT as opposed to random stuff that wastes time. The blog will always be personal in nature and I’ll continue to post my recommendations, reviews, photos, recipes, and stories about me and Anna. But I’m going to cut down on the frequency of when I blog, be more deliberate about what I write about when I do, and really try to use this site to develop the discipline of writing as well as develop content that is constructive in nature. I think this template has the ability to help me do that better.

Or maybe I’m just taking myself way too seriously.

It will be more of an aggregator of content as opposed to a running stream of whatever I think is important.

Anyway . . . if you’ve read this far . . . I’d love your feedback.